Extremely Graphic R-Rated Sci-Fi Comedy Will Take Over Your Hometown

By Robert Scucci
| Published 12 seconds ago

Though it’s billed as a sci-fi horror comedy, I wouldn’t consider 2024’s Ick a horror film. It’s a monster story, and it certainly has fun with Lovecraftian imagery (read: lots of tentacle violence), but if anything, it’s a comedy that leans into horror tropes rather than a horror flick that adds levity through comic relief.

With a real-life global pandemic still in recent memory, Ick also has fun with how people react to government mandates when the powers that be, at least as far as we know, are actually trying their best to protect their citizens. A lot of the humor comes from the fact that the citizens of Eastbrook refuse to stay confined to their homes. The titular Ick has been a presence for as long as they can remember, and they’ll be damned if they can’t go about their daily lives just because it suddenly becomes violent and starts killing everyone in its path.

Normalizing Something Horrible

When we’re first introduced to Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), it’s the early 2000s, and he’s a high school football star destined for greatness, dating the girl of his dreams, Staci (Mena Suvari). During one of his games, he’s attacked by the Ick, a giant, tentacled, and seemingly sentient organism that lives beneath the town. Nobody believes him when he claims his life-altering injury, which requires him to wear a leg brace for the rest of his life, was caused by the Ick, and life goes on without him.

Between the early 2000s and present day, Hank becomes a shell of his former self. He never leaves his hometown of Eastbrook and now works as a high school science teacher. Staci ends up marrying former classmate Ted Kim (Peter Wong), and together they have a daughter named Grace (Malina Pauli Weissman). Hank has good reason to believe Grace may actually be his daughter, given her date of birth, his sexual history with Staci, and the fact that Grace looks nothing like her Asian father.

Shortly after collecting saliva samples from his students so he can secretly run a paternity test, the Ick, as he always suspected, becomes violent and slowly starts destroying the town. The Feds show up and advise all the citizens of Eastbrook to lock down, only to be met with immediate pushback. Prom is coming up, which is the big event none of the teenagers want to miss.

Given that we’re talking about kids and what’s considered by most to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, they’re right to be apprehensive about government overreach. It’s the adults who act like children here, as they absolutely refuse to let their way of life be interrupted, consequences be damned.

From this point forward, Ick goes full bore into tentacle-driven madness, leading to the kind of third-act blowout that makes the Stranger Things finale look like a strawberry festival by comparison. It’s full-on Lovecraftian bedlam, but I still refuse to call Ick a horror movie. It never gets scary in the traditional sense, and most of the plot is driven by the sheer magnitude of CGI violence, panic, and constant allusions to a ridiculous rivalry between Eastbrook and the neighboring town of Vicksburg that’s never explained but constantly brought up.

Oh, Come On!

Ick wins serious points for its willingness to go fully absurd, and that’s not even the best part about this movie. What really sold me was realizing that every single little setup, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has an eventual payoff. I can’t get into them too deeply without revealing massive spoilers, but everything from the specs of Ted’s car to the Louis Vuitton pepper spray comes back into play when you least expect it, instantly reminding you of the first-act moments where these plot devices were subtly introduced. It’s an alarming and impressive amount of Chekhov’s gunnery from start to finish, and you don’t even realize it in real time because everything unfolds so casually.

The only thing that really took me out of the movie, even if only briefly, was the excessive use of needle drops in the first act. They really had to drive home the point that Hank listened to Good Charlotte, All-American Rejects, and Fountains of Wayne (because he dated Staci, and they have that song about her mom). For a second, it felt like a gigantor slice of Member Berry pie, but circling back to the Chekhov’s gun thing, it had to be this way. Otherwise, we’d never get the Creed montage that makes the third act so memorable. After all, we’re all six feet from the edge if you think about it. 

All in all, Ick is an absolute blast from start to finish. It has the small-town charm and sense of adventure that the golden era of Stranger Things had, and it’s not afraid to embrace its own ridiculousness. The science behind the titular tentacled antagonist is deliberately under-explained so you can just lock in and enjoy the show without putting much thought into it.

Ick is hilarious, thoughtful, and excessively violent in all the best ways. If you want to see what it’s all about, you can stream it on Tubi for free as of this writing.